Читать книгу The Dark Ages, 476-918 онлайн

67 страница из 149

It was in the very year of Euric’s death that Chlodovech, now aged twenty-one, set out on the first of his warlike expeditions. In company with his kinsman Ragnachar, king of Cambrai, he invaded the realm of the Roman patrician Syagrius. The Gaulish troops were unable to resist the onset of the Franks, and their leader, after a short struggle, abandoned his home, and fled for safety to the court of Alaric the Visigoth. The councillors of Alaric, either wishing to gratify their Teutonic neighbours, or fearing the event of a war while their king was yet so young, threw the patrician into bonds, and sent him back to Chlodovech, who promptly put him to death. |Chlodovech conquers Syagrius, 486.| The Seine valley and the great towns of Soissons, Paris, Rouen, and Rheims now fell into the hands of the Frankish king, and, in the course of the next three years, he extended his power up to the Loire and boundary of Armorica, where the Romano-Celts of the extreme west still succeeded in holding out. Chlodovech took all the spoils for himself, none fell to his neighbours, the other kings of the Salian Franks. It was these princes who were next to feel the force of his arm. He picked quarrels with his kinsmen the kings of Cambrai and Térouanne, the one for not helping him against Syagrius, the other for claiming part of the spoil of the Roman, and slew them both, the one by treachery, the other in open battle. The remaining Merovingian princes of the Belgic plains soon shared their fate; then Chlodovech pressed eastward against the Ripuarian Franks, and conquered the Thoringi, their chief tribe, in the year 491. In a short time he had won all the Frankish kingdoms save that of his ally Sigebert the Lame, king of Köln. He remorselessly slew every prince of Meroving blood who fell into his hands, and did his best to exterminate all the rival lines. When he could find no more to kill, he is said to have made open lamentation that he was left alone in the world, and that the royal house of the Franks was threatened with extinction; he then bade any kinsman who might yet survive come to him without fear. But it was cruelty, not remorse, that moved him, for his only object was to catch and slay any Meroving who might yet survive.